Welcome to the first episode of the We Rise podcast! This episode we spoke to Dr Aggie Hirst from the Department of War Studies at KCL about feminism in International Relations Theory, wargaming, and inequality in academia.
Dr Aggie Hirst is Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory and Methods in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her research is situated in the fields of international political theory and critical military studies. She is Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme Trust and British Academy funded research project exploring the US military’s use of wargames and simulations for teaching/training purposes. She is currently completing her second book, The Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), which explores of the phenomena of play and immersion, arguing that the ‘flow state’ generated by gaming is being used to instil doctrine and cultivate mental and physical muscle memory in service members. She has recently published articles with Review of International Studies (2019), Critical Military Studies (2020), and International Political Sociology (2021) on play, videogames, and the wargames renaissance, and she has recently discussed her research at the University of St Andrews Visualising War project: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1717787/8763213. Dr Hirst is also a lead co-author of new IR Theory Textbook with Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2022) and the EDI Lead for the Department of War Studies.
Links to research mentions in the show about women in wargaming:
https://www.wired.com/story/women-wargaming-sexism-harassment/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/magazine/woman-war-gaming.html
https://paxsims.wordpress.com/tag/women-and-wargaming/
https://wavellroom.com/2021/01/15/wargaming-has-a-diversity-problem/
https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2019/08/a-wargame-at-rand-puts-teen-girls-in-command.html